Exploring the wonders of creation through a 50mm lens...and other lenses too.

Almost exactly one year ago I shared a photo of something called the Magic Tree. It’s in Columbia, Missouri, and we like to go see it (there’s actually two of them) every year when we visit my wife’s family over Christmas. The photo I shared last year was shot with my Fuji X100F, and it’s actually the same tree as this year’s image, but the two pictures could be seen as two extreme ends of the same spectrum. One one end you have last year’s photo which was a close-up of a single green light with a thousand other bulbs scattered throughout the background. When we revisited the same location over Christmas a few months ago I wanted to go way to the other end of the continuum and capture an image of the entire tree. But in a different way than you might expect.

As we were walking around the tree it was about 30 degrees and windy, and my wife’s mother commented that it would be fun to get a video clip of the glowing branches swaying in the wind. I thought about this for a bit and realized that I could do something like it, but with a single image. I could use a long exposure to capture a sense of motion without taking any video at all. The difficult part (aside from waiting for a particularly strong gust of wind) was limiting the amount of light entering the camera to get an exposure long enough to capture a great deal of movement.

Enter the Fuji X100F, to the rescue once again.

Even after setting my ISO to 200 and my aperture to f/16, I was only getting a shutter speed of around 10 seconds for a properly-exposed image, which was much shorter than I wanted. Even though I shot this in RAW which meant I had a lot of editing flexibility in Lightroom I didn’t want to blow out the highlights, and even exposing for 15 seconds was far too much. Then I remembered that my X100F had an ideal solution: the built-in ND filter. I don’t use it very often, but good gravy it sure is handy in a pinch. The 3-stop ND filter gave me an exposure time of 30 seconds, which was even just a bit dimmer than I wanted but plenty to get the look I was aiming for.

The result is an interesting effect: many elements in the picture are static: the gazebo, the street light, the background lights, and the trunk of the tree. But the higher up the trunk you look the more you see the result of winds blowing through the branches, and it almost makes you dizzy to look at it. You might also notice that the horizon is slightly off-kilter, which was due to my tripod not being quite level, and while I would normally fix this in Lightroom I decided to leave it just as it was shot in order to give the viewer a small sense of unease. I really like how this turned out, and I hope you are able to go see these lights if you ever get the chance.

I wasn’t actually going to use this photo for anything, much less a Weekly Fifty post, when I shot it outside Willard Hall in mid December at Oklahoma State University. It was really just me getting out for a few minutes with my new camera and 70-200 f/2.8 lens, and and taking a few pictures just for fun. But as I was looking through my image library in Lightroom something caught my eye about this particular photo. It’s different from other squirrel pictures I have taken, and a little more compelling and interesting than a squirrel just sitting on the ground or climbing a tree. I realized after a while that what really made this one stand out was the lighting, much moreso than just about any other image of an animal I have shared here on the blog.

I got this shot after a walk around Theta Pond with my camera and not seeing anything that I wanted to photograph. Like, nothing at all. Not a single goose or duck or turtle or anything. No worries though, it was a nice day and I needed to get back to my office anyway. Then I saw this squirrel by the base of a tree, and followed him a hundred yards north to a large porch on the south end of Willard Hall. Like most squirrels this one was a little skittish, but I was quiet and careful and eventually got a picture just like this but shrouded in shadow. Oh well. That happens. And then, almost as if this little guy knew what I was up to, he scooted over just a few inches so his face was perfectly lit. I raised my camera, fired off three exposures in rapid succession, and he turned and ran the other way.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I believe this little squirrel gave me a photographic gift that afternoon. The way the light hits his eye, and the shadows wind across his body, add a sense of depth and complexity that I don’t normally get in most of my shots. Usually I look for subjects that are evenly-lit all around, which is kind of boring but it’s a formula that works for me. This picture, while nothing especially noteworthy as far as shots of squirrels go, was different enough that I’m starting to re-think my approach to animal photos altogether.

Like last week’s photo, I shot this when I was out for a walk at Theta Pond on a warm day in December. And like last week’s photo this one is also a duck, though in a slightly different context. I shot this with the same camera/lens combination (Nikon D500, 50mm f/1.8) and, as with last week’s photo, I have the camera’s Live View to thank for it. But before I get to that, look at the water in the foreground. In order to get this shot I held my camera about an inch off the surface of the water which wasn’t super risky since there wasn’t much in the way of wind or waves, but it still was just a little nerve-wracking. Let’s just say I made sure to use both hands and a sturdy wrist strap.

One thing about Nikon DSLRs and Live View is that they’re just not great when it comes to continuous autofocus tracking. They’re not even that great at single-point autofocus, though I do appreciate that on this D500 you can at least tap the screen to set your focus area. For this shot I set the focus are and then continually pressed the back button to reset focus as the duck swam around, and basically just sat there taking a bunch of photos for a minute until the duck turned around to go to the other side of the pond. I wasn’t all that optimistic that any shots would be usable, but this one turned out great not just from a compositional standpoint but also because it’s super sharp and in focus. Most of my other shots were either not quite focused or the duck was in a weird position. But this one…well, this one worked :)

I have noticed that I tend to go in waves, so to speak, with photos at Theta Pond. I’ll walk over there and be enamored of the foliage and fauna one day and return to take some pictures, and then weeks will go by without me giving it a second thought. Even though it still feels like cheating to walk a few hundred yards from my office to get pictures of animals that are there pretty much year-round, it is something I enjoy doing and I try to tell myself that it’s OK to repeat the same type of image. Every picture is unique even if the subjects are the same, and as long as I enjoy the process and learn something from it then what’s the harm in doing so?

Over Black Friday weekend I made a purchase that I had been saving for since the beginning of the year: a Nikon D500. I bought it specifically to get shots of my kids as they play sports, and in a way this camera choice is a tangible artifacts reminding me of how far my two boys have come in the past eight years. My wife and I bought our first DSLR because our little Panasonic pocket camera didn’t take great photos of our newborn son, and that Nikon D200 and 50mm f/1.8 lens immediately sent our photo quality into the stratosphere. Since then we have made other gear purchases because of the needs they met–not simply because they looked cool or we had money burning a hole in our pocket. That’s actually the number one question I ask people when they seek my advice on a camera: what problem do you want it to solve? Once you know that answer, you can start looking for a camera or lens or other piece of gear that will do the trick. Over the years as our kids grew we bought different cameras and lenses in order to better document their daily activities, with my favorite being the Fuji X100F that I have mentioned so many times here on Weekly Fifty. I realized when our oldest son started YMCA soccer in the spring of 2018 that I wanted another arrow in my photography quiver to take better pictures of him, and the answer to that gear question was the Nikon D500.

I wouldn’t say that this picture would be impossible on my other cameras, but it would have been a lot more tricky had I not used the D500. For one, I needed to get on eye level with this duck which was aided dramatically by the flip-out screen on the back of the camera. My D750 has that too, but the D500 has dramatically improved Live View autofocus which really came in handy here. Were it not for that I’m not sure that this photo would exist, which I guess goes to show that while better gear won’t make you a better photographer, it can help to a certain degree depending on what you need it to do. I slowly crept up to this duck and used Live View to focus on its eye, and was able to take one or two pictures before it got spooked and went on its merry way.

What lens did I use, though? None other than the humble little 50mm f/1.8 that I’ve had since the beginning. It’s the lens that got this blog started, and it’s still one of my favorite pieces of gear that I don’t plan on replacing any time soon.

My brother Phil came for a visit with his family a few months ago and while they were here I got kind of fascinated at his use of close-up filters. Any longtime reader of Weekly fifty knows that I’ve taken my fair share of macro shots using close-up filters, but that kind of photography sort of ebbs and flows with me. I’ll be super into it for a while and then move on to something else, but when Phil was here it was kind of inspiring watching him find ideas for shots where I would have never considered to look. Even just out in my front yard he was pointing his camera at leaves, bricks, mailboxes…almost like he was seeing it anew with fresh eyes, and even though all those things are part of my daily life I never really thought about them as potential photo subjects. Watching him was a fun reminder that yes, there really are interesting photo opportunities all around, which is a lesson I feel like I’m constantly re-learning as I continue to explore photography.

Since their visit I have been taking a bit of a renewed interest in close-up photography, and this is one example of the fruits of my camera-related labors. In mid November we had some rainy days here in Oklahoma, and since those are some of my favorite shooting conditions I thought I would bring my camera to work and see if I could get any shots if the opportunity presented itself. I had a shot just like this in mind, so as I was walking through the gardens I kept my eyes open for a drop of water on a leaf. That’s one thing I’ve noticed over the years–I find that inspiration comes more easily if I at least have some kind of basic concept in mind for a picture and then seek out ways to capture that shot, rather than just wandering around and waiting for something to strike my fancy.

This was taken in the formal gardens right in front of the student union as I was on my way back to the office after meeting with a faculty member. I had my D7100 and +10 filter because I knew that I would need to get super close to get a picture of a water droplet on a leaf, and it took a few tries but I eventually got one that I was happy with. The first few didn’t work out as well as I hoped, partly because I was using too wide of an aperture and also because the overall composition just wasn’t super compelling, but this one ended up almost exactly like how I pictured in my mind. I wanted to have a picture where the drop of water was centered with some color in the foreground and background, and what made this one work in particular was how the yellow leaf on which the drop is resign lends a sense of depth to the composition. I had some other shots where the leaf was sideways which made the image seem kind of flat and uninspiring, but this one turned out pretty well.

I have taken other shots like this one over the years (kind of like how I have also taken shots of magnolia seed pods) but as long as I’m learning something new and finding creative ways to explore this type of image then I feel satisfied in what I have accomplished.